ComposerOfAvantGarde

Solo drum kit? Is this like a rock/jazz drum kit or a more classical assortment of percussion? Choir piece too! Guitar/String Quartet too?

I'm shocked, really looking forward to hearing these man

Yes, a rock/jazz kit. He was very specific with the kit, nothing too fancy really. As for the women's choir piece, I am getting a text written for it very soon..........hopefully today but it could be later in the week.

I have started on fluctus;discursus for guitar and string quartet already. Part of the brief is to write a piece inspired by some paintings of a storm over the sea (the 'fluctus' part of the title (waves, and that is a long u in fluctuuuus to make it plural)), but I am also taking some material from the guitar part of the bagatelles and elaborating upon it throughout the piece. 'Discursus' has a double meaning here; it draws on the English usage of the word when referring to logic and also the Latin meaning. The composition presents a musical 'argumentation' of each phrase from the source material, whilst also 'running about' with motific fragments.

ComposerOfAvantGarde

Been working on a piece for a women's choir. The text seems to be inspired by some kind of internal pressure on tension that someone feels when very restricted, and possible harmful consequences. So far, I haven't explored a lot of the text. Beginning quite slowly and letting the text unfold and become more important as the piece progresses.

To be completely honest, I have no experience writing for a choir and I haven't thought much about anything structural for the piece........so it is a bit of a mess so far in terms of ideas.

ComposerOfAvantGarde

Oh I have also just found a solo clarinet piece I wrote earlier this year, for which a live recording actually does exist............I just need to get it off the computer it is stored on.......................

Mind you, the very first multiphonic was notated completely wrong!!!!!!

ComposerOfAvantGarde

Bergträume for guitar duo will receive its world premiere at the Melbourne Recital Centre on the 26th of February 2018; be there or be square! I will be around for a chat with the musos after the concert.

Bergträume for guitar duo will receive its world premiere at the Melbourne Recital Centre on the 26th of February 2018; be there or be square! I will be around for a chat with the musos after the concert.

Congrats on the forthcoming performance. Your work is always interesting and thoughtful. I'm sure it will go well!

ComposerOfAvantGarde

Hm yeah there should be more soon I think. I am currently trying to see how I can create a more unified harmonic language with some more Boulezian 'pitch multiplication' and other tools and techniques that can help give this work some more coherency. At the moment, it's just that excerpt which I deleted the video for and some more sketches on paper.

The programme was actually changed slightly due to the very unfortunate early passing of wonderful composer Phillip Houghton, whose music has shaped and influenced the classical guitar world in Australia more than anybody else's and whom I had hoped to meet at the concert as well. Even though I never did get to meet him, I played a lot of his works and his way of composing for guitar certainly influenced the way I thought about the resonance of the instrument when composing.

ComposerOfAvantGarde

I have recently downloaded a free software from IRCAM called OpenMusic to see how this helps to formalise my composition process. I am curious to know if anyone here has used it and can tell me what their experience was like.

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ComposerOfAvantGarde

lil update, been working on something. Here is three minutes of a new version of fluctus;discursus which is considerably different to a version I started working on last year. This time I feel I really needed to develop my understanding of harmony, so I used a little technique to create bigger versions of 3 and 4 note chords that are vertically symmetrical. It gave me a good, limited variety of notes to work with in passages where I want to explore the sound of a particular chord.

ComposerOfAvantGarde

So in order to simply get some more notes out of the ones I already have without bashing away at a piano, I simply inverted it as my step 1:

and then I stacked transpositions of the original chord on notes from the inversion:

And then deleting any pitches which appear more than once, I can end up with the following vertically symmetrical chord:

Well, I guess even the much simpler Original and its Inversion played at the same time will be symmetrical, with the E flat right at the centre, but fleshing it out in this way provides nifty shortcuts to much richer harmonies in general. I have also used this tool with the original chord stacked on notes from other chords than just an inversion of itself.

Something I found interesting about that chord is that it leaves out three chromatic pitches. The remaining pitches gave me the potential to create another chord in the same way and that chord itself is pretty much just a smaller version of the earlier chord related through transposition. Having these two chords at my disposal gives me a pretty nice harmonic starting point to digress from later in the piece when I isolate certain chords within the chords as 'reservoirs' to develop even further.